This week in religion history: A Diet of Worms leads to trouble for Martin Luther

April 14

73: Rather than face defeat at the hands of the Romans, Jews in the fortress of Masada committed mass suicide.

1682: Archpriest Avvakum, the leader of a traditionalist movement within the Russian Orthodox Church known as the Old Believers, was martyred. At Czar Theodore’s order, he and several other prisoners were locked in a log cabin and burned alive.

1759: German composer George Frideric Handel died at age 74 in London. He worked mainly in England and Italy, and his most famous work is The Messiah. Despite being totally blind for the last six years of his life, Handel occasionally conducted performances of his works.

1775: The first society for the abolition of North American slavery was organized by Quakers in Philadelphia.

1986: Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu was elected Anglican Archbishop of South Africa. He became the first black head of the church in South Africa.

April 15

1469: Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born in India.

1452: Leonardo da Vinci was born in Vinci, Italy. He would go on to paint some memorable religious scenes, most specifically The Last Supper.

1729: Composer J.S. Bach conducted the premiere performance of his St. Matthew Passion at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany.

2008: Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Washington, his first pontifical visit to the United States.

April 16

556: Roman-born Pope Pelagius I became the 60th successor of St. Peter. He built the Church of the Twelve Apostles.

1189: St. Drogo, also called Druon, a Flemish saint who became a hermit in Sebourg, France, died. Today, he is known as the patron saint of shepherds.

April 17

1492: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain granted Christopher Columbus a commission to seek a westward ocean passage to Asia. Columbus considered himself a missionary who would carry Christ across the ocean to people who had never heard the gospel.

1521: Martin Luther went before the Diet of Worms to face charges stemming from his religious writings.

2008: Pope Benedict XVI, during his visit to Washington, talked and prayed privately with survivors of the clergy sex abuse scandal in what is believed to be a first-ever meeting between a pontiff and abuse victims.

2012: The British Library said it paid $14-million to acquire the St. Cuthbert Gospel, a remarkably well-preserved palm-sized manuscript copy of the Gospel of John in Latin. It came from the time of St. Cuthbert, who died in 687, and it was discovered inside his coffin when it was opened in 1104 at Durham Cathedral.

April 18

1506: The foundation stone was laid at a celebration overseen by Pope Julius II to begin construction of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

1521: At the Diet of Worms, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V condemned Martin Luther a year after the latter had been excommunicated by Pope Leo X. Luther refused to repent despite the severe action taken against him.

1874: The remains of British missionary-explorer David Livingstone were interred in Westminster Abbey in London.

1993: Pope John Paul II beatified a fellow Pole Blessed Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, the Apostle of Divine Mercy. She was canonized seven years later on April 28 by the same pontiff.

2004: The Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual and political leader of Tibet, addressed thousands of followers at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver during his first visit to Canada in 11 years.

April 19

1529: Eight years after the Diet of Worms was convened by the Holy Roman Emperor, a protest against it was published by several cities including Strasbourg, Nuremberg and Ulm, and from that evolved the term Protestant.

1943: Thousands of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto began an uprising against Nazi occupation forces after they discovered they would be moved to the gas chambers at Treblinka. By the time the Nazis crushed the revolt May 16, more than 40,000 Jews had been killed or deported.

1993: 80 Branch Davidian cult members and their leader, David Koresh, died in a fire that broke out when federal officers tried to end a 51-day siege at the compound near Waco, Texas.

2005: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany was elected Pope in the first conclave of the new millennium. He is known as a rigorously conservative guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy. The 78-year-old cardinal who chose the name Benedict XVI, was installed the 265th Pope on April 24, 2005.

April 20

1534: French explorer Jacques Cartier left St-Malo on his first voyage to Canada. After reaching Newfoundland in just 20 days, Cartier explored the Strait of Belle Isle, which he hoped was the beginning of a river leading to China. But after exploring the desolate Labrador coast, Cartier wrote in his diary, “I believe that this was the land God allotted to Cain.”

1986: Ohio evangelist Jim Brown claimed that the theme song for the talking horse TV show Mister Ed included such satanic messages as “the source is Satan” and “someone sung this song for Satan.” A few days later a large group of teenagers burned record albums, cassettes, and other rock and country music paraphernalia after attending a seminar at Brown’s First Church of the Nazarene.

2003: Four nuns belonging to Sisters of Charity were killed in a car crash on Trans-Canada Highway west of of Calgary.

2008: Pope Benedict XVI prayed at Ground Zero, the site of Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and later celebrated mass at the Yankee Stadium in New York, at the end of his six-day tour of the United States. It was his first visit as Pope to the U.S.